Website 101 – Business on The Web

There is much debate online about guaranteed search engine rankings and there appears to be a war of words between firms that do, and firms that don’t. We like to leave it up to the client to decide on who they would prefer to deal with, but here’s my two cents worth on the subject.Why is this such an issue?There is a massive amount of confusion and misinformation out there about Guaranteed rankings, due in part to the three main players in the industry, those who do, those who don’t, and those who pretend they can.The biggest misunderstanding is that the firms who don’t guarantee results believe that as no SEO firm owns a search engine, they can’t possibly achieve the desired results, therefore the guarantee is worthless, unless a firm uses unethical techniques and the firms who DO guarantee results believe that the firms who don’t are just greedy, lazy and have no confidence in their own abilities.So who are the main players?The SEO firms who WILL guarantee their work The SEO firms who WON’T guarantee their work, and The SEO firms who WILL guarantee their

I am often asked “where can I find an SEO consultant?” by people who want help with their websites. As an SEO consultant myself this is an easy question to answer! But many people aren’t entirely sure what SEO is let alone what an SEO consultant does.Quite simply SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It’s a rather pretentious phrase which is about getting your website easily found by the search engines. Ultimately it is about getting your site to be found higher up the search results than any of your competitors. That’s why business attracting traffic online get very excited about it and very competitive.If you want to ‘SEO’ your pages it’s usually best to ask an SEO consultant but you can also have a go yourself. There are lots of things you can do to achieve this. If you have a site already then you may be compromised by what you’ve done to it already but essentially here are 10 things an SEO consultant would advise that you be thinking about:1. Relevant content – it’s true that ‘content is king’ if your site is not giving

The times are tough these days from an economic point of view. For many, this raises the question of how to address SEO in tough economic times.SEO is the ultimate game of delayed gratification. You must work your hard and smart now to reap the benefits the down the line. This leads to a host of issues that can drive a person batty. When I think of the time I’ve wasted in the past, it is enough to drive one to the bottle.This delayed gratification aspect, however, is taking on a secondary focus in these tough economic times. The problem is simple. Most niches on the web have seen sales slow to some extent. In truth, the web has proven to be remarkably resistant to the recession, particularly compared to brick and mortar retailers who are crashing and burning. Even for sites that are doing okay, there is a definite nervousness about the rest of 2009.Many people on the web are tempted to turn their attention to the issue of saving money. Since SEO requires some serious patience, the conflict is obvious. Should you spend valuable resources